Saturday before last Stanley Aronowitz was in Dublin and we grabbed him to do a talk at Seomra Spraoi on ‘Popular Education in a time of Struggle’. This was part of an ongoing effort to get a Education Workers Network off the ground and the meeting did attract 30+ people which is pretty good for a Sunday afternoon.
Stanley Aronowitz on Popular Education in a time of Struggle (talk given to WSM in Dublin ) by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud
Saturday before last Stanley Aronowitz was in Dublin and we grabbed him to do a talk at Seomra Spraoi on ‘Popular Education in a time of Struggle’. This was part of an ongoing effort to get a Education Workers Network off the ground and the meeting did attract 30+ people which is pretty good for a Sunday afternoon.
Stanley Aronowitz on Popular Education in a time of Struggle (talk given to WSM in Dublin ) by Workers Solidarity on Mixcloud
Stanley gave us a pretty long introduction as to who he was and what he had been involved in before we switched to a question and answer session of similar length (and then retired to the Hop House bar for further discussion over food and a rake of pints!).
He probably mentions his own writings a little too often in the talk (but judge that for yourself) but what was most interesting for me was both the question and the later discussion about anarchism in the US and the question of anarchist organisation. He’s actually quite a hard line ‘organisationalist’ pretty much saying in the talk that those who weren’t in an organisation were more properly described as sympathisers with anarchism rather than anarchists.
The timing was also good in repect of the fact that my previous branch meeting had held an educational around the work of Paulo Freire. Although I’d heard the phrase ‘popular education’ many times over the years I’ve not really paid any particular atttention to what is advocated so this has been quite interesting. I find I’m somewhat confused as to just how applicable it would be as a methodology somewhere like Ireland and quite what an application would look like.
The talk is pretty informal and starts with Stanley talking about his experiences before moving on to take questions on specific areas. Topics covered include
Occupation of Brooklyn college over student newspaper ban
Being a steel worker & union organiser
Red baiting in the labor movement
Going to the New School
Paul Avrich on schools outside public education system
Struggles in the public school system for alternative schools
The Brecht forum
Murray Bookchin
Workers Centers & the Taxi workers alliance
Workers Education
The Murphy Institute
Q&A
Teaching Plato to working people
Relationship between Pop Ed and revolutionary change
Working class intellectuals
Gramsci
Paulo Freire’s
Knowledge Factory
Overcoming codified jargon
Teaching line by line
Hope & Vision
Class formation
Revolutionary organisation & sympathisers
Does pop ed depend on an existing mass struggle
and more
I uploaded it to indymedia.ie at the end of last week, you can listen to it there at http://www.indymedia.ie/attachments/apr2009/stanleyaronowitz2wsm.mp3
WORDS Andrew Flood (Follow Andrew on Twitter )